


To Be Human

by ParadoxinMotion



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Falling In Love, M/M, Ronan is a turtle that seeks emotional invulnerability within its shell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-05
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-31 09:00:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6464104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParadoxinMotion/pseuds/ParadoxinMotion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world has never made any claims about fairness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Be Human

The world has never made any claims about fairness.

This is a place where, undeniably, some people are made happy, and most others live their lives doomed to the unchanging sensation of _wanting_ and a hefty impression of confusion.

You see, some people see their soulmate, and it makes them happy. There’s a teacher at school whose husband picks her up from work, and she’s beaming a whole hour before he even shows up. They got lucky. They live normally.

There are also people who find their soulmate, and it is a little bit crushing. Gansey, for instance. When he and Blue laid eyes on each other, it was like confirming an idea that Blue had had long ago, even before she’d met them. There is no denying that they make excellent soulmates, with the small exception of _no kissing_.

There are finally people who find their soulmate, and then lose them. Maybe that’s the worst, right after never finding them at all. Maura Sargent still sees colours, but she and everyone else knows it is not because of _Mr. Gray._ Although it is arguable that he makes her much, much happier. Perhaps this logic is flawed, twisted, even cruel. But it is what it is.

For a while, the space of a few months, after he’d begun to see colours, Ronan denied their presence even to himself. You see, most people assume that when you meet them, it’s _bam!_ Colours. A cacophony of them.

This is not the case.

For some, it is like that. Gansey and Blue, for instance.

But for a lot of people, it’s slower. Like their brain is waking up, like their senses still haven’t figured out why they were tingling. This is what happened to him, and perhaps _tingling_ is too mild a word for it. His entire system is overwrought, stretched too tight, pulled too thin. He hears his ears buzzing, but this time it is not from things like _dream hornets._

He does not say anything, even to himself, when this happens, and there are several reasons folding themselves into one person as to why.

Ronan Lynch has found his soulmate, and his soulmate does not care.

Adam Parrish is slender, with clever light eyes and dusty brown hair and hands that are continually chapped. Ronan wants to inspect them up close, to look, but most of all to just _touch_. His world has bloomed into a burst of colour but Adam? Adam has seen colour since Cabeswater got to him.

Claimed him.

And Adam accepted it.

Ronan tries not to think too hard about this. It makes him angry, which is fine, but also sad, and that is not fine. That is something he is always, always trying to stay away from. If you are angry, something is causing it. You can stop it and put it to rest and let your thoughts lie quiet.

If you are sad, well. Sometimes there is no reason at all, to be sad.

"Being sad is like being human," Blue had once said. "It's not like you can get away from it, but most times you just don't think about it."

Maybe Maggot had a point.

Sometimes, when he's trying to sleep, he ends up dreaming instead. He doesn't try to, (most times), but somehow the starting point to everything seems to be Adam. More specifically, Adam's hands. Their slightly calloused knuckles, the elegant paleness of them despite his multiple jobs in harsh heat, even the little square-shaped scar just above his left thumb from when he'd burnt himself a year or two ago.

Ronan Lynch wants what he cannot have, and subsequently he wants it all the more.

Cabeswater seems to know, though, and while it isn't jealous, it isn't open to sharing, either. Cabeswater _needs_ Adam, and on this they agree, but for very different reasons. Cabeswater needs Adam because he has accepted-no, _volunteered_ to be hands, eyes, sometimes mouth.

Ronan Lynch needs Adam Parrish because wanting Adam is like being human: you can't escape it, but sometimes you don't have to think about it.

Sometimes, maybe when Cabeswater is feeling spiteful (if this is even possible) or maybe Ronan's just a little too drunk, he hears whispers.

Non est tibi.

_He is not yours._

Even in the dream, the sheer obviousness of the statement rages against the lining of his skin like a microscopic wildfire. He shouts into thin air. "Why bother?"

Why bother?

Cabeswater never deigns to make a reply.

 

There is a girl who works at the liquor store he frequents. She is one of two people who knows that he sees colours, and he has full confidence that she will not tell a soul.

Her name is Isa, and if you ever call her _Izzy_ she’ll take you down with a bottle of Jack Daniels to the head and a smile. Ronan likes her immediately.

He doesn’t think she’s stupid enough to buy the fake ID being real, but she never questions it, either. In this way, he supposes, they have an understanding.

Sometimes she’ll make him stay for a while; pull out a barstool, pours him a glass of malt whiskey and leans on the counter. Expectant, but not demanding. Sometimes Ronan wonders why his soulmate couldn’t have been someone like her. He’s pretty sure she’d sleep with him if he asks; sure, he doesn’t _like girls,_ but he doesn’t _like this ache_ or even _like malt whiskey._

So that’s all a bit relative, anyway.

Some days he tells her about Adam; always bits and pieces, like a puzzle that’s always expanding. He also allows himself to be honest in a way he’d never ever be for anyone or anything else at any other time.

“His eyes have this brightness to them; like he’s hiding a field of stars back there.”

“His fingers. Why does no one ever ask to look at his fingers up close? I know they want to.”

“He laughs sometimes, and it’s like being out on the open highway, driving your car.”

Who knew he could wax so poetic with his lungs and eyes mutually burning?

Isa never tells him what to do. That’s another thing he likes about her; he’ll repeat a conversation and she’ll pick it apart, interpret it like an astrologer interprets the stars, but she’ll never _tell him._

She will _comment._ She will _observe._ She will _speculate._

Sometimes, her speculation hits a little too close to home. “Do you think he ever wonders who his soulmate is?” She asks it in her slow, quiet lilt of a Henrietta-bred accent. Ronan has considered this question so many times it might as well be a mantra, except that it makes him feel restless instead of calming him down.

“Dunno,” he says, honestly because that is all he has left, at this point. “Don’t think he cares, to be very fucking honest. He’s got…” he trails off a little; the one thing he has never told Isa about is Cabeswater. How do you bein to explain a thing like that? Gansey could do it, probably. Not him. “He’s got a lot of stuff going on,” he finishes, aware that it is a lame response.

Isa’s eyebrows go up a little, but all she does is pour him some more malt. In the end, it’s Ronan who breaks the silence, thoughts whirling like a car kicks up dust in a drag race. “He’s focussed. All the time. On everything and nothing.”

Isa is drinking a beer out of its bottle, and she swirls the liquid a little before answering. “Where do you fit in?”

That definitely seems to be the question.

 

Gansey knows, and so Ronan wonders if Blue knows.

When he asks, blunt and expectant, like he assumes that it’s already happened, Gansey assures him that she does not.

“I wouldn’t tell her something like that,” he promises, face and voice equally earnest.

Ronan’s face twists into a sour expression, but even he is not sure why. Maybe because for him, being angry will always be easier than admitting to despair. That anger will always come easiest, and for some people, that is a curse, but for him, it is a blessing. A watered-down thing he can hold onto when the world (and Cabeswater) remind him again and again.

Non semper erunt.

_He will not ever be yours._

Stupid latin. _He will never be yours._

Ronan gets it, but he doesn’t get why the two of them seem so desperate to tell him what he already knows.

 

Adam Parrish is beautiful, and _all days_ Ronan _notices,_ but some days it is such a fact that not even Blue can ignore it.

“You look real nice today,” she says to him, and he smiles. Ronan remembers suddenly that he used to like her, like her a _lot,_ (if he does not still like her now), and his empty hands curl into fists at his sides.

Some days, Ronan is so in love with him that even breathing feels superfluous. It is ridiculous, and it makes him angry because it makes him feel vulnerable, but the fact remains.

“Where do you feel like going to for lunch?” Adam has turned to him, is asking him with the slightest edge of pensiveness knotting up the space between his eyebrows. Sometimes colours feel hyper-realistic; too bright, purposefully blinding.

“Hell if I know,” Ronan says.

Adam rolls his eyes, and turns to Gansey. “You, then.”

Gansey pauses to consider this for a moment, arm snug around Blue’s shoulders. “Asian?” he suggests, and even Ronan smiles.

“You have to migrate to a different culinary culture,” Noah informs him as they drive.

“Asian is incredibly healthy, for the most part,” Gansey defends staunchly.

“For the most part,” Ronan echoes, and Adam staves off a laugh. Their legs are pressed together with the tightness of space, and when Adam covers his mouth with one hand as he _almostquitenotnearly_ laughs, he unconsciously presses a little bit closer.

Ronan looks out the window, and aches, and aches, and aches.

 

“This is really unhealthy,” Noah tells him, appearing suddenly to sit cross-legged on the floor at Monmouth, a few feet from where Ronan himself is leaning against the bed.

“The takeout?” Gansey had insisted that Ronan, of all people, take the leftover Asian food from lunch home, and he ate some of the leftovers for dinner.

Noah scowls, and then smoothes it over as he looks up at the window. “You know what I mean.”

Ronan tries to never lie. The words _No, I don’t_ are heavy on his lips, but he manages to pour some other ones out first. “Only sometimes.”

“I bet he wouldn’t say No,” Noah continues helpfully. Ronan pulls his earphones from around his neck to over his ears, and pretends to listen to music.

There is silence for a minute, three minutes, five.

“I could ask him for you?” Noah offers, and Ronan stiffens. Fuck Noah and his ghostly sense of hearing.

“So, I’m guessing that’s a No.”

Ronan opens his eyes and levels him with a look, but Noah does not shrink back. He looks sad, all of the sudden, but the _why_ of it is not something Ronan knows. He doesn’t have to, anyway, because Noah explains himself.

“I never tell one of you what another one has asked me not to say,” he says. There is no guile in his tone; he’s not trying to guilt-trip Ronan, he’s stating a fact. “You guys entrust me with a lot. A lot lot. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think about the things you tell me.”

Ronan closes his eyes again, and tries to think back to every time he has brought _Adam_ up in Noah’s presence.

The other boy’s voice is quiet as he finishes. “And I think you should tell him. Ronan.”

The additive of his name feels somehow unnecessary, like Noah is trying to say something else entirely just by tacking it on. Ronan refuses to think about it.

He surprises himself by asking a question. “Did you ever find a soulmate?”

Noah blinks, Ronan cannot see it, but somehow he knows it. Except that behind the safety of his closed eyelids, it is not Noah sitting there on the floor, it is Adam. He furrows his brow in irritation because _it is always fucking Adam._

_Not when I sleep, not when I dream, not when I wake up._

He wants to tell Adam to stop tailing him wherever he goes.

“No,” Noah says, breaking Ronan’s train of thought and the silence. “Guess it’s kind of lucky, huh?”

Ronan shrugs his shoulders. The earphones are starting to feel uncomfortable and hot on his ears, so he takes them off. His words feel like boiling syrup on his tongue. “Does Adam ever talk about me?”

He looks at Noah then, because he cannot help himself. If Kavinsky survived off of that green pill, Ronan survives off of thoughts of Adam.

“Sometimes,” Noah answers, and there’s an edge of cautiousness to it that Ronan knows is warning him to be careful about his phrasing.

He keeps his voice calm, even casual. “What does he say about me?”

For a moment, he thinks Noah is about to tell him. This boy in front of him with a body like shifting prisms in its tangibility and a lifetime of secrets already seems like a dam about to burst.

But somehow Noah pulls himself in, closes his eyes briefly, and shifts a little. “I already said I never tell one of you something that another one has asked me not to say.”

Ronan’s eyebrows lift, and it feels like there is something pressing against his temples briefly. “So he doesn’t want you to tell me what he’s said?”

Noah nods. Opens his mouth, shuts it.

“Is that bad?” Ronan does not know why he needs to know the answer to this so desperately. But, then again, he does not know why nature has dictated that he _want Adam Parrish_ so badly. A single touch of his fingers would be blissful, the answering press of his lips would be consecration.

Noah looks like he is fighting with himself, and then finally seems to settle on an agreement. “Please tell him, Ronan.” His voice is low and urgent; one might say he sounds _invested._ “Please tell Adam that you’re in love with him.”

_You’re in love with him._

Amas eum.

They are words Ronan has never even said to himself. He looks up at the ceiling because his throat suddenly feels constricting, and he wants to drive until he cannot feel his fingers on the wheel anymore.

By the time he looks back to where Noah had been sitting, the light-haired boy is gone.

 

The world has never made any claims about fairness. It is often cruel, and more than a little uncaring, and it forces you to shape yourself.

Most times, it does not give you things like _help_ or _mercy._

But sometimes, rare times in Ronan’s memory, it does.

Adam has agreed to ride with him back to the car shop where Adam works, but halfway there he’d gotten a phone-call saying that the next hour’s shift was covered. Someone had picked it up, and Adam has nowhere to be until then.

Ronan knows, suddenly, that the time for silence is coming to an end. Coincidences do not happen, and they especially do not happen in Cabeswater. He wonders if it was Noah, or maybe even Gansey. Or maybe he’s overthinking it and it was no one he knows at all.

They drive to an outlook on the mountain, one where you can see the trees but see the open sky, too. Gansey found it on one of his many explorative treks, and Adam seems to like it.

“Thanks for taking me,” Adam says to him, when the car has pulled to a stop.

Ronan nods, distracted, unbuckling his seatbelt and climbing onto the front of the car until he is sitting next to Adam, looking up at the sky. It’s a waxing half-moon tonight, and the glow of it casts a sheen on Adam’s quiet face that is almost ethereal.

“Does Cabeswater know?” He asks. “About soulmates? Like, the idea of it?”

Adam looks surprised by this question. “Sure, I guess. In its own way.”

“You saw colours, right?” Ronan presses. There’s a feverish melody playing a beat underneath his skin. “When you offered yourself to it.”

Adam nods, slowly. He looks confused, but he’s also looking at Ronan. “A lot of things happened,” he hedges.

“But especially that one.”

Adam simply nods. “Why is that important? If you’re saying Cabeswater is my _soulmate_ now or something-“

“I don’t.” Ronan interrupts. “I was just curious.”

“Oh.”

There is silence for a few moments, and Ronan is trying to push himself to speak, to _say it._ His mouth is opening, in fact, but Adam beats him to it.

“The thing is,” he says, slowly, accent just peeking around the corners of his syllables. “When I sort of…came back…after that whole incident. Not like, when I _woke up_ or something, but when I really came back to reality. Right before the thick of things. You said something to me, remember?”

Ronan nods, barely daring to look at him. His heart is a devastating symphony against his ribs.

_“Look what you’ve done, you crazy bastard!”_

Ronan shifts slightly, but there is a noise against his right ear that will not be quiet until he has heard and understood it.

Non est tibi.

_He is not yours._

Ronan flinches, scowls, stiffens at the repetition of a phrase, a thought, a concept he knows too well. But Cabeswater isn’t finished this time.

Factus est eius.

_You became his._

His eyes widen a little, he turns to look at Adam, who is now watching him. It seems Adam is not finished, either.

“When you said that to me…I started seeing them.” His voice is quiet with acceptance. “Colours. Like a paint bucket with a million colours was suddenly dumped on me.”

Ronan can actually feel his throat working. He hates the sensation of holding off tears because it is so foreign, but also because it is somehow so familiar.

“I see colours because of you,” Adam says, rephrasing his sentence, and he is still looking at Ronan. Their faces cannot be more than inches apart. His hand rests on the hood of the car, so close Ronan can almost feel the tiny hairs on its surface.

Ronan has a million things to say, but the one that makes its way out is, “That’s what it meant.”

Adam looks perplexed. “What?”

“Quae prius,” Ronan mutters. _I was yours first._ “That’s what Cabeswater has been saying, the whole time. Fucking convoluted thing that it is.”

Adam still looks perplexed, and so Ronan ignores any shred of thought left in him and seals the distance between them. He’d always imagined it to be a little rough, a little desperate, but somehow Adam has made it a sonnet. A lover’s fingers on a harp; the trickle of water through hands. Adam does not pull away, and Ronan’s hand moves to cradle his face while the other finds Adam’s fingers on the metal and slides in between them.

They kiss for a minute, an hour, a decade. Ronan doesn’t care about much of anything, except Adam. His heart is still galloping in his chest and his whole body feels like a live wire. He wonders briefly if Adam feels the same, if he cares about feeling the same.

Ronan Lynch loves Adam Parrish not like _to be sad is to be human._ Ronan Lynch loves him like he loves the speed of a car, the openness of Monmouth, the fact that Adam is here and kissing him.

Ronan Lynch loves Adam Parrish like one soulmate is in love with the other.

Eventually, they part, lips a little red, eyes a little brighter. Their hands do not separate, however, and when Ronan murmurs _Amo te_ Adam drops his head on Ronan’s shoulder and breathes.

 _Amo te,_ he repeats, fingers tightening on his, Ronan’s lips barely pressed to his forehead.

 

The world has never made any claims about fairness. It is often cruel, and more than a little uncaring, and it forces you to shape yourself.

But sometimes, out of no necessity or requirement, the world is unaccountably kind.

 

Itaque, inter vos.

[ _And so, you belong to each other._ ]

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading! This was my first Raven Cycle fic that I'd ever written, period, and I'm sure it shows. :P I have not taken latin in several years, and as such may have hopelessly garbled something, or multiple somethings. If you see it and are able to offer correction, I will love you forever.


End file.
